The Death of Protestant America:
A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline

[COMMENT: America is dying, the America which God gave
us is dying. We have all but lost our sense of spiritual direction with
corrupt churches, and ignorant and cowardly clergy. But God will
raise us up again, most likely through persecution, the standard way of
purifying us -- in the fire.

Bottum is very pessimistic, gives no signs of expecting a
spiritual renewal. And no serious vision of how we are going to pull out
of this nosedive. His most hopeful sign, I think, is his identifying in
some measure the intellectual failure as part of the problem. We have lost
our way with truth. We have no capacity to identify it, speak about it
with confidence, and therefore no capacity to live by it. We have
therefore lost our grip on moral truth, on religious truth. Almost all
Christian speakers argue from pragmatic grounds, not from truth or moral
authority. That is a primary sign of a dying culture.

Nothing will change until we (1) regain our
epistemological grip on truth;
(2) understand the Biblical worldview;
(3) become able again to apply those to the issues of the
public arena: politics, economics, education,
the media, the arts, family life, etc. The task of the Road to Emmaus is
to help rebuild the Biblical theological foundations of Western civilization.
As we accomplish that, it will send a beam of light piercing the darkness.
And we will see again.

D' Toqueville said that America was great because she was
good, and that when America ceased to be good, she would cease to be great.
That has happened at every level of our being. We no longer have a serious
vision of the Good.

We have become one of the most murderous nations in history,
50,000,000 little babies slaughtered in their mother's wombs. All in the
name of Goodness! And we have young students, for the first time in
human history, taking deadly weapons to each other -- for FUN.

It amazes me that God still spares us as He has -- a sign that
He still has a purpose for us, but only if we Christians begin picking up our
crosses daily and following Him -- intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
God uses the worst of circumstances to prepare for His own next move. Deo
gratia!

NOTE: My underlining below for emphasis.
E. Fox]

I

America was Methodist, once
upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or
Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. A little light Unitarianism on one side,
a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right
down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets.

The average
American these days would have ­trouble recalling the dogmas that once
defined all the jarring sects, but their names remain at least half alive: a
kind of verbal remembrance of the nation’s religious history, a taste on the
tongue of native speakers. Think, for instance, of the old Anabaptist
congregations—how a residual memory of America’s social geography still
lingers in the words: the Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish, set here and
there on the checkerboard of the nation’s farmland. The Quakers in their
quiet meeting­houses, the Shakers in their tiny communes, and the
Pentecostals, born in the Azusa Street revivals, like blooms forced in the
hothouse of the inner city.

And yet, even
while we may remember the names of the old denominations, we tend to forget
that it all made a kind of sense, back in the day, and it came with a kind
of order. The genteel Episcopalians, high on the hill, and the all-over
Baptists, down by the river. Oh, and the innumerable independent Bible
churches, tangled out across the prairie like brambles: Through most of the
nation’s history, these endless divisions and ­revisions of Protestantism
renounced one another and sermonized against one another. They squabbled,
sneered, and fought. But they had something in common, for all that.
Together they formed a vague but vast unity. Together they formed America.

In truth, all the
talk, from the eighteenth century on, of the United States as a religious
nation was really just a make-nice way of saying it was a Christian
nation—and even to call it a Christian nation was usually just a soft and
ecumenical attempt to gloss over the obvious fact that the United States
was, at its root, a Protestant nation. Catholics and Jews were
tolerated, off and on, but “the destiny of America,” as Alexis de
Tocqueville observed in 1835, was “embodied in the first Puritan who landed
on those shores, just as the whole human race was represented by the first
man.”

Even America’s
much vaunted religious liberty was essentially a Protestant idea. However
deistical and enlightened some of the Founding Fathers may have been, Deism
and the Enlightenment provided little of the religious liberty they put in
the Bill of Rights. The real cause was the rivalry of the Protestant
churches: No denomination achieved victory as the nation’s legally
established church, mostly because the Baptists fought it where they feared
it would be the Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians fought it where they
feared it would be the Congregationalists. The oddity of American religion
produced the oddity of American religious ­freedom.

The greatest
oddity, however, may be the fact that the United States nonetheless ended up
with something very similar to the establishment of religion in the public
life of the nation. The effect often proved little more than an agreement
about morals: The endlessly proliferating American churches, Tocqueville
concluded, “all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the
Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man
to man.” The agreement was sometimes merely an establishment of manners:
“The clergy of all the different sects hold the same language,” he added.
“Their opinions are in agreement with the laws, and the human mind flows
onward, so to speak, in one undivided current.”

Morals and
manners, however, count for a great deal in the public square, and, beyond
all their differences, the diverse Protestant churches merged to give a
general form and a general tone to the culture. Protestantism helped define
the nation, operating as simultaneously the happy enabler and the unhappy
conscience of the American republic—a single source for both national
comfort and national unease.

We tend to
remember the Mainline as the strong, unified denominations that emerged from
the 1910s through the 1950s: Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and so
on; their churches gently jostling one another along the pleasant,
tree-lined streets of the typical American town. But the madly splintering
sects that Tocqueville saw in the 1830s—they, too, are what we might stretch
to call the Mainline, for even at its greatest, the undivided current of
Protestantism never reached the ecclesial unity of a single church. It
achieved, instead, a vocabulary: a way we had to understand ourselves
outside our political struggles and economic exchanges.

Think of the
American experiment as a three-legged stool, its
stability found in each leg’s relation to the other legs.
Democracy grants some participation in national
identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in
history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness.
Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets
for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the
virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile,
religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of
human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in
turn, toward hegemony and conformity.

Through most of
American history, these three legs of democracy, capitalism, and religion
accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one
another. There’s a temptation to call Protestant Christianity the most
accommodating religion ever known, but, again and again, the churches
managed to withstand the politics and the economics of the age. Indeed, what
made them good at accommodation was also what made them good at opposition:
In the multiplicity of its denominations, Protestantism could influence the
nation in churchly ways without actually being a church—without being a
single source of religious authority constantly tempted to assume a central
political and economic role.

The great fight to
abolish slavery, or women’s suffrage, or the temperance struggle against the
Demon Rum, or the civil-rights movement: Every so often, there would explode
from the churches a moral and prophetic demand on the nation. But, looking
back, we can now see that these showy campaigns were mostly a secondary
effect of religion’s influence on America. Each was a check written on a
bank account filled by the ordinary practice and belief of the Protestant
denominations.

As it happens, the
denominations were often engaged in what later generations would scorn as
narrow sectarian debates: infant baptism, the consequences of the Fall, the
saving significance of good works, the real presence of the Eucharist, the
role of bishops. And yet, somehow, the more their concerns were narrow, the
more their effects were broad. Perhaps precisely because they were aimed
inward, the Protestant churches were able to radiate outward, giving a
characteristic shape to the nation: the centrality of families, the pattern
of marriages and funerals, the vague but widespread patriotism, the strong
localism, and the ongoing sense of some providential purpose at work in the
existence of the United States.

Which makes it all
the stranger that, somewhere around 1975, the main
stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of
Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians,
and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and
devout. For that matter, you can still find, ­soldiering on, some of the
institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National
Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s
Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by
President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if
they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of
Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and
the Great Church of America has come to an end.

And that leaves us
in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of
the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event
that distinguishes the past several decades from every other ­period in
American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural
oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The
Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even
significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national
self-understanding.

The nation has
passed through even harsher ­periods, of course. In 1843, for instance, the
Antislavery Society adopted a resolution that famously read, “The compact
which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an
agreement with hell.” But since the 1970s, we have faced a unique kind of
political dilemma, in which no agreement can be reached even on the terms by
which we will disagree with one ­another.

Notice, for
instance, how quickly these days any attempt to speak
in the old-fashioned voice of moral criticism turns sour and bitter—segueing
into anti-Americanism, regardless of its intentions. Many Americans are
profoundly patriotic, no doubt, and many Americans are profoundly critical
of their country. We are left, however, with a great problem in combining
the two, and that problem was bequeathed to us by the death of Protestant
America—by the collapse of the churches that were once both the
accommodating help and the criticizing prophet of the American ­experiment.

II

Membership in American denominations has always been
hard to measure. Even today, the numbers are uncertain—with, oddly,
the smaller groups harder to count than the larger.

Historical data is
worse yet, for the pressure from the eighteenth century through the
nineteenth was often toward division into ever smaller versions of those
difficult-to-quantify sects. By 1800, as the historian ­Gordon Wood points
out, “There were not just Presbyterians, but Old and New School
Presbyterians, Cumberland Presbyterians, Springfield Presbyterians, Reformed
Presbyterians, and Associated Presby­terians; not just Baptists, but General
Baptists, Regular Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Separate Baptists, Dutch
River Baptists, Permanent Baptists, and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptists.”

Early in the twentieth century, a trend toward
consolidation began to take hold. Several things facilitated the
trend. Those years saw, for instance, the peak of a
great missionary movement in which, for two or three generations, the
Protestant churches creamed off their best and brightest young people and
sent them off to convert the heathen. (It is said that, as late as the
1970s, the most commonly shared characteristic among Americans in Who’s
Who was “child of missionaries to the Far East.”) And out in the mission
fields, a kind of practical common cause was forced on the Christians,
an “ecumenism of the trenches,” which—because of
the prestige of the missionaries—increasingly influenced their home
churches.

Then, too, there
was the fight between the fundamentalists and the
modernists. Building for some time, that fight would come to a head
when the powerful liberal preacher Harry Emerson
Fosdick delivered his famous 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”
at New York’s First Presbyterian Church, and Princeton’s conservative John
Gresham Machen published his defining 1923 book, Christianity and
­Liberalism.

Part of the result
was new fissures: Machen, probably the great American theological mind of
his generation, would flee Princeton, moving to Philadelphia to found the
more conservative Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929.
But another part of the result was
increased agreement
about what was, and what wasn’t, the American Mainline. The liberal
churches all felt they were under assault from a fundamentalist offensive
that detested both their social-gospel theology and their ecumenically
minded church organization. And so, gradually, those churches came to hold a
kind of horizontal unity that cut across denominational divides: a fellow
feeling that made liberal Baptists, for instance, think themselves closer to
liberal Congregationalists than to the fundamentalists of their own
denomination.

“Shall the
Fundamentalists Win?” was not universally applauded at the time, even by the
congregants at First Presbyterian. The local presbytery investigated
Fosdick for heresy in 1923 (his defense counsel
was the future secretary of state, John Foster Dulles,
father of the Catholic convert Avery Cardinal Dulles), and he
resigned his pulpit—only to have John D. Rockefeller Jr. build for him New
York’s Riverside Church, an avowedly interdenominational church, the
flagship of Mainline Protestantism in America.

Riverside opened
in 1930, and by that point a fairly small and
manageable set of liberal churches had come to be understood as the Mainline:
the Baptists (at least in their Northern churches), the Disciples of Christ,
the Congregationalists (later merging with a set of German Reformed churches
to create the United Church of Christ), the Episcopalians, the Lutherans (in
some of their forms), the Methodists, and the Presbyterians.

The
high-water mark came around 1965, when members
of the various churches broadly within these denominations constituted well
over 50 percent of the American population. Their numbers, although not
their percentages, maintained a little growth through 1975. But, as Kenneth
Woodward pointed out in a much discussed 1993 Newsweek ­feature, they
have been “running out of money and members and meaning” ever since.

Every survey
produces different results, but all of them report a
Mainline Protestantism in rapid decline. According to the Yearbook
of American and Canadian Churches, only three Mainline denominations
still have enough members to be included among the ten largest churches: the
United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

All three have
suffered serious losses: the Presby­terians down 1.6 percent over the
previous year, the Lutherans down 1.09, and the Methodists down 0.79. The
other Mainline churches show the same pattern: The Episcopalians, for
instance, lost 1.55 percent of their members in 2005. By 2025, runs a bitter
joke among conservative Anglicans, the Episcopal Church will have one priest
for every congregant. And these recent numbers are actually a slight
improvement. The greatest damage was done from 1990 to 2000—a decade in
which the United Church of Christ declined 14.8 percent, for example, and
the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) 11.6 percent.

Another way to
parse the data is to consider the average age of church
membership. The 1998 to 2002 sets of the General Social Survey show
that the Mainline Protestant denominations have the oldest average age of
any religious group in America, at almost fifty-two years. And they will get
older yet. In 2005, the Baylor Religion Survey found that 28.1 percent of
believers aged sixty-five and over—but only 17.6 percent of those thirty-one
to forty-four—identify themselves as members of the Mainline.

Strength of belief is usually taken to indicate future
stability: a measure of the likelihood that a denomination’s members
will pass their faith on to their children. When the Baylor study asked
about doubts of the existence of God, 100 percent of the members of
historically black Protestant churches reported no doubts, 86.5 percent of
evangelical Protestants had no doubts, and only 63.6 percent of the Mainline
had no doubts. Asked about Jesus, 95.1 percent of black Protestants, 94.4
percent of evangelicals, and 72.2 percent of the Mainline responded that
they believed him to be the son of God.

In the
practices of piety—another measure of the
likelihood of passing on the faith—67.1 percent of
evangelicals pray every day, while only 44.1 percent of the Mainline
Protestants do. Reading the Bible regu­larly? The Baylor study has
evangelicals at 42.1 percent, and the Mainline at 16 percent. A recent
report from the Pew Forum gives numbers generally higher than previous
studies, but the decline of the Mainline is still ­apparent. Pew reports,
for instance, that 58 percent of evangelicals attend religious services at
least once a week, while just 34 percent of Mainline Protestants do.

Various
somewhat-affiliated denominations, to­gether with the historically black
churches, raise the numbers considerably. But the actual organizations at
the center—the defining churches in each of the denominations that make up
the Mainline—have fallen to insignificance. The Disciples of Christ with
750,000 members, the United Church of Christ with 1.2 million, the American
Baptist Churches with 1.5 million, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) with 2.3
million, the Episcopalians with 2.3 million, the Evangelical ­Lutheran
Church in America with 5 million, and the United Methodist Church with 8.1
million: That’s around 21 million people, in a nation of more than 300
million. The conservative Southern Baptist Convention alone has 16 million
members in the United States. The Catholic Church has 67 million.

In other words,
less than 8 percent of Americans today belong to the
central churches of the Protestant Mainline.

III

From the
beginning, Protestants in America felt some interdenominational unity simply
because they were all Protestants—named
by their protest against Rome. The United States never experienced a
state-sponsored Catholic Church, capable of oppressing dissenters. Still,
even in this country, the Protestant imagination was formed by works such as
John Foxe’s 1563 Book of Martyrs, and it retained a collective image
of the Reformation as a time when Protestants of every stripe were martyred
for their faith by the Jesuitical priests of the Roman Antichrist.

“Universal
anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigorously
cultivated in all the thirteen colonies,” as John Tracy Ellis wrote in his
groundbreaking 1956 history, American Catholicism. Inflamed by
immigration worries in the nineteenth century, that bias would break out in
forms such as the Boston mob’s burning of an Ursuline convent in 1834 and
the Blaine Amendments of the 1870s, which wrote into state constitutions a
ban on the use of public funds by religious institutions. Even in calmer
periods, the anti-Catholic foundation of Protestantism, the essential
protest against Rome, helped form the peculiar national institution of
mutually antagonistic churches somehow operating socially as a unity.

Social class fits in somewhere here, as well:
the old cultural remnants of Mainline wealth,
breeding, and assurance. The established upper classes in Protestant
America—the Boston Brahmins, the Upper Tenth of New York, the inhabitants of
Philadelphia’s Mainline: all the Social Register types up and down
the Eastern seaboard—hardly welcomed the waves of emigrants from Catholic
Europe during the nineteenth century.

The twentieth
century would bring its own examples. Take, for instance, the
peculiar case of James Pike, the Episcopal
bishop of California in the 1960s. His fame seems to have declined in recent
years. Who now remembers much about the man? Still, he deserves not to fade
entirely away, for he was an all-American . . . well, an all-American
something, though what, exactly, remains unclear. A churchman,
certainly, and a public celebrity—but perhaps, beyond all that, a genuine
cultural symbol: his moment’s perfect type and figure.

As it happens,
Pike’s family was Catholic when he was born in 1913. He didn’t become an
Episcopalian until after his second marriage, in 1942, while he was a
government lawyer in Washington—and he didn’t enter the seminary until after
his service in the Second World War, when he was already in his thirties.
From that moment on, however, his rise was meteoric.
By 1949 he was chair of the religion department at Columbia University and
chaplain of the school. In 1952 he became dean of the Cathedral of St. John
the Divine in New York, and in 1958 he was elevated to bishop of
California—all this as a convert in a church that prided itself on its
old-fashioned composure and careful ­discernment.

Many in the
denomination mistrusted him, but Pike was the
irresistible man, the torchbearer of the time: his face in every
photograph, his signature on every petition, and his blessing on every
cause. He first achieved fame in the early 1950s (as fame is measured, at
least, by praise from the New York Times) with his attacks on the
Catholic Church and its opposition to contraception. In the later 1950s, he
burnished his image in the fight against segregation. And by the mid-1960s,
he seemed constantly in the news—Bishop Pike denies the
virginity of Mary! Bishop Pike rejects the dogma of hell! Bishop Pike denies
the Trinity!—all while announcing publicly his embrace of Gnostic mysticism
and appearing on a televised séance to contact the ghost of his dead son.

In 1969 he and his
third wife drove off into the wadis of the Israeli desert, where he died,
dehydrated and alone, as his wife hiked ten hours back from their stranded
rental car. “It was our first time in the desert,” Mrs. Pike later told the
press. “We didn’t take a guide. We were very stupid about that.”

But, in truth,
there was something stupid from the beginning about the
charismatic and charming James Pike. Oh, he was smart enough to sound
intelligent, and he was extremely savvy about the star-making power of the
press. In another sense, however, he was merely ­riding his unconscious
awareness of the age, discarding doctrine in the name of ethics, and he was
always ­ feckless:
dangerously irresponsible, ­refusing to think his way through causes
and ­consequences.

“Practically every
churchgoer you meet in our level of society is Episcopalian,” he wrote in a
letter to his mother, urging her to join him in his move away from
Catholicism. It is an astonishingly revealing line: unselfconscious, lacking
any reference to faith, openly rolling together class and anti-Catholicism
to form the great motive for conversion. From there to an Episcopal bishop’s
throne was only a few small steps—“barely twelve years,” as Time
magazine pointed out in a fawning 1958 story about Pike’s arrival at Grace
Cathedral in San Francisco.

The path doesn’t seem much different today. The
Episcopal Church used to be “larger percentagewise,” the current presiding
bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, admitted to the New York Times
at the end of 2006. “But Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend
to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics
and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.”
Episcopalians, she said, aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by
having children—indeed, “it’s probably the opposite. We encourage ­people to
pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their
portion.” Applauding her parents’ decision to leave the Catholic Church and
become Episcopalians when she was nine, Bishop Schori added, “I think my
parents were looking for a place where wrestling with questions was
encouraged rather than discouraged.”

Schori is by no
means a radical, as such things are counted these days in the Episcopal
Church—the home, after all, of V. Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual
bishop of New Hampshire, and John Shelby Spong, the retired bishop of
Newark, who has denied even the possibility of meaningful prayer. She seems,
rather, a fairly typical liberal Protestant: a rentier, really,
living off the income from the property her predecessors purchased,
strolling at sunset along the strand as the great tide of the Mainline ebbs
further out to sea.

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already
loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A
Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in
Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal
­reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise
dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is
support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to
show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often
points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world, and
when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal
Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development
Goals.

Her
Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent
Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld. And through it all you can hear the notes
of Bishop Pike—not the lyrics, perhaps, but always the melody. There’s the
same cringe-making assumption of social superiority: “Episcopalians tend to
be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates” than the lower
classes of Catholics and Mormons. For that matter, there’s the same
unselfconscious declaration of superiority even to faith:
We’re theologically more advanced precisely because we
don’t have a theology—we have “a place where wrestling with questions” is
“encouraged rather than discouraged.”

The Mainline, however, shifted to a surprising degree
in the fifty years between Bishop Pike in 1958 and Bishop Schori in
2008. Pike was newsworthy precisely because he seemed contrary to type: a
chaplain to the establishment who campaigned against that establishment.
Schori seems instead a solid, unexceptionable instance of her type: a
representative of the moods and politics of the establishment Episcopalians
who elected her their presiding bishop.

Early in 1953,
Pike refused an honorary degree from the Episcopalians’ seminary in Sewanee,
Tennessee, because of the school’s segregation. “The Church has never
regarded the civil law as the final norm for the Christian conscience,” he
wrote in the noble peroration of his letter of rejection. (Although, in
characteristic Pike fashion, he sent the letter to the New York Times
before he sent it to Sewanee.) As it happens, the man was not far out of
step with his church; even in the South, Episcopalians were moving quickly
toward support for integration, and, just a few months later, the school
began admitting black students. Still, it seemed—and was widely reported
as—a new thing when the dean of St. John’s Cathedral denounced one of his
own church’s seminaries. To create a parallel instance of ap­parent class
betrayal, Bishop Schori would have to do something like take to the pages of
Human Life Review to attack her congregants’ support of legalized
abortion.

She’s not likely
to do that, perhaps mostly because abortion offers a key measure of the
changes in the social class of liberal Protestants over the past fifty
years. The role of abortion, and of feminism generally, deserves its own
chapter in any telling of the Mainline story. But here’s a small case study:
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, I was at the Episcopalians’
National Cathedral in Washington, on a panel to discuss violence and
religion. The evening began with a prayer from Jane
Dixon, the cathedral’s temporary bishop, and her invocation was as revealing
as any short speech could be of the concerns of the contemporary Episcopal
Church.

While asking the
divine gifts of wisdom for the speakers and understanding for the listeners,
Bishop Dixon was vague—not merely failing to name the name of Jesus but
straining to phrase all her requests in a ­passive
voice to avoid even naming God: “May we be given . . . may it be
granted to us . . .” When her prayer unexpectedly
swerved toward abortion, however, her language suddenly snapped into hard
specificity as she reminded God that “America at its best stands for
the spread of rights around the world, especially the right of women to
choose.” The discussion that evening, she prayed, would not turn vindictive,
for we could not condemn the destruction of the World Trade Center until we
remembered that “even in the United States, people have bombed abortion
clinics.”

The important
thing to understand here is the social shape of these issues and their
uniform acceptance by a certain class. Bishop Dixon was speaking the
language of Bishop Pike, and yet, at the same time, she was not shocking her
listeners. She was, rather, confirming them in their settled views. Sometime
after the 1960s, everyone in the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church became
Bishop Pike—with the perverse effect that Pike’s ostensible rebellion
turned, at last, into the norm. Formed in the victory of civil-rights
activism, a new version of the social-gospel movement became the default
theology of church bureaucrats in the Mainline. The churches “increasingly
turned their attention to the drafting of social statements on a variety of
contemporary problems,” as the religious historian Peter J. Thuesen has
noted, and their statements “revealed a shared opinion among Mainline
executives that the churches’ primary public role was social advocacy.”

The result is an
ethical consensus unfailingly consistent with the political views and
cultural mores of a particular social class—in fact, the class of
professional women in the United States since the 1970s. Certainly on the
question of abortion, and probably on the question of homosexuality, such
­bishops as Jane Dixon and Katharine Jefferts Schori face no serious
opposition among the elite of their denomination in the United States. The
Episcopal Church remains the chaplaincy of an establishment, but it is an
establishment much diminished—in class, numbers, and influence—for only
Pike’s heirs have stayed in the church bureaucracy, and they have no one to
speak to except themselves.

H.L. Mencken is
usually credited with dubbing the Episcopal Church of the 1920s “the
Republican Party at prayer.” The Episcopal Church today seems hardly
distinguishable from the small portion of America that is the National
Organization for Women at prayer.

IV

The
Episcopalians are hardly alone. Many
commentators, analyzing the decline of liberal denominations in recent
decades, have pointed to the gains of conservative churches. Dean Kelley, a
legal advisor at the National Council of Churches, was one of the first to
notice the phenomenon, predicting in Why Conservative
Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (1972) that
the trend would ­accelerate.

His prediction
found strong confirmation just over twenty years later,
when the pollsters Benton Johnson, Dean R. Hoge, and Donald A. Luidens
published in First Things
their important 1993 analysis, “Mainline Churches: The Real Reason for
Decline.” “In our study,” they wrote, “the single best
predictor of church participation turned out to be belief—orthodox Christian
belief, and especially the teaching that a person can be saved only through
Jesus Christ. . . . Amazingly enough, fully 68 percent of those who
are still active Presbyterians don’t believe it.”

The economist
Laurence Iannaccone filled in more of the puzzle with a fascinating 1994
essay, “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.”
Iannaccone insisted that the stricter forms of religious life have benefits
that looser and more liberal churches do not. Considered purely in economic
terms, he wrote, religion is “a ‘commodity’ that people produce
collectively.” Precisely because the personal costs are so high, a strict
church soon loses “free riders,” the people who take more than they give.
And the remaining members find a genuine social community: a tightly knit
congregation of people who are deeply concerned with one another’s lives and
willing to help in time of need. They gain something like ­intellectual
community, as well—a culture of people who speak the same vocabulary,
understand the same concepts, and study the same texts.

More recent
research, following Iannaccone’s path, has added demonstrations that the
best way for, say, a poor woman to improve her social
and economic class is to join an active and strict church. The
chances of forming stable marriages will be increased
for both herself and her children, the probabilities of being drawn
into crime and drugs will be decreased, and even her opportunities for
employment will be raised.

Intellectual community may be even more decisive.
Over the past thirty years, Mainline Protestantism has crumbled at the base,
as its ordinary congregants slip away to evangelicalism, on one side, or
disbelief, on the other. But it has weakened at the head, too, as its most
serious theologians increasingly seek community—that
longed-for intellectual culture of people who speak the same vocabulary,
understand the same concepts, and study the same texts—in other, stricter
denominations.

All these themes
appear in the open letter the elderly Lutheran
theologian Carl Braaten wrote in 2005 to Mark Hanson, the presiding bishop
of the Mainline branch of Lutheranism, the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America. It is, in its way, a terribly sad document, as he notes
how the Lutheran Church in which he was brought up “has become just another”
Mainline church. “I must tell you,” he explains to Bishop Hanson, “that I
read all your episcopal letters that come across my desk. But I must also
tell you that your stated convictions, punctuated by many pious sentiments,
are not significantly distinguishable from those that come from the liberal
Protestant leaders of other American denominations.”

There used to be a
distinct Lutheranism that he understood, Braaten writes. He learned it “from
Nygren, Aulen, Bring, Pinomaa, Schlink, P. Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Pannenberg,
Piepkorn, Quanbeck, Preus, and Lindbeck”—a roll-call of once famous Lutheran
thinkers—“not to mention the pious missionary teachers from whom I learned
the Bible, the Catechism, and the Christian faith.” All that “is now
marginalized to the point of near extinction.”

Indeed, Braaten
insists, the church’s “brain drain”—the parade
of contemporary Lutheran theologians, one after another, joining other
denominations—is caused by this loss of any unique Lutheranism: “While the
individuals involved have provided a variety of reasons, there is one thread
that runs throughout the stories they tell. It is not
merely the pull of Orthodoxy or Catholicism that enchants them, but
also the push from the ELCA. . . . They are convinced that the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America has become just another liberal Protestant
denomination. . . . They are saying that the Roman
Catholic Church is now more hospitable to confessional Lutheran teaching
than the church in which they were baptized and confirmed.”

The letter is, in
fact, a long litany of loss: disjointed, heartfelt, flailing; a bewildered
catalogue of all the things Braaten thought mattered. He carefully lists his
antique political credentials (“I am a life-long political liberal. . . . My
wife and I opposed the unjust war against Vietnam”)—as though that would
give him standing. ­Educated at Harvard and Heidelberg, he records his
contributions to the high theological controversies of Lutheran days gone
by—as though that would save him from irrelevance. He names the long
generations of his family’s missionary work in Madagascar, Cameroon, and
China—as though Bishop Hanson would suddenly remember the 1920s world of
prestigious mission boards and halt the tumble of Lutheranism down into the
miniature melting pot that is Mainline Protestantism in twenty-first-century
America.

The influence of
the Lutheran Church was bigger back when its ambitions were smaller. While
the denomination was growing from a set of German and Scandinavian
immigrants’ churches to a full member of the American Mainline, Lutherans
typically wanted only to hold their faith, supporting the nation in general
while speaking out against specific social ­failures. The civil-rights
movement, for instance, showed a strong Lutheran component, although the
Prohibition-era war on alcohol was not joined by many church members. Local
campaigns against pornography always had high Lutheran participation, but by
the 1950s the Lutheran vote in national elections was largely
indistinguishable from the general voting patterns of the rest of the
country. They influenced American culture mostly by being themselves: a
significant stream in Tocqueville’s undivided current.

Where are they
now? Well into the twentieth century, Lutherans were uncomfortable with
their relation to other Protestant churches. The more conservative branches
of Lutheranism still maintain some of that old distance: Neither the
Missouri Synod (with 2.5 million congregants) nor the Wisconsin Synod (with
400,000) are members of the National Council of Churches, for example. But
about this much, Carl Braaten is right: The largest branch, the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America, has merged itself almost entirely with the other
liberal Protestant denominations.

V

Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran—the
name hardly matters anymore. It’s true that if you dig through the
conservative manifestos and broadsides of the past thirty years, you find
one distressed cry after another, each bemoaning the particular path
by which this or that denomination lost its intellectual and doctrinal
distinctiveness.

After you’ve read
a few of these outraged complaints, however, the targets begin to blur
together. The names may vary, but the topics remain the same: the uniformity
of social class at the church head­quarters, the routine genuflections
toward the latest political causes, the feminizing of the clergy, the
unimportance of the ecclesial points that once defined the denomination, the
substitution of leftist social action for Christian evangelizing, and the
disappearance of biblical theology. All the Mainline
churches have become essentially the same church: their histories,
their theologies, and even much of their practice lost to a uniform vision
of social progress. Only the names of the corporations that own their
properties seem to differ.

Good riddance,
some would say—including the Methodist Stanley Hauerwas, named by Time
magazine in 2001 the nation’s “best theologian.” A pacifist of generally
liberal bent, Hauerwas is hardly a political conservative. Neither is he a
backward-looking Great Awakener, preaching fire and brimstone to call
Protestants home to their fundamentalist roots. He has always liked the
Christianity of the Protestant Mainline. Or, rather, he has always liked it
except insofar as the Mainline operates as the Mainline, performing
its old unifying functions in the American social experiment.

With such books as
After Christendom and Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible
from ­Captivity to America, Hauerwas has demanded that the nation’s
churches renounce their historical role as patriotic chaplains to American
culture. That role, he thinks, is idolatry—a sacrilegious substitution of
the nation-state for the Church of God—and he finds traces of its blasphemy
in everyone from the ­eighteenth-century John Witherspoon to the
­twentieth-century Reinhold Niebuhr.

“Preaching to the
choir,” we used to call what Hauerwas is doing. America’s Mainline churches
still preserve, in certain ways, the mood of the days in which they really
did define the nation. (“Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Episcopalians each form
around 2 percent of the American population,” runs an old joke from the
sociologist Peter Berger. “Guess which group does not think of itself as a
minority.”) But it has been years since these churches were what Hauerwas
excoriates them for being. The Mainline is now only
embarrassed by its old Mainline place, by its vanished role as both the
enabler and the conscience of the American republic.

Look, for
instance, on the official website of the United Church
of Christ, where there’s something called UCC FIRSTS: A Journey
through Time—a list of the historic achievements of the various
Congregationalist and German Reformed churches that joined to form the
denomination in 1957. The items run from John Winthrop’s 1630 prayer that
the Massachusetts Bay Colony “be as a city upon a hill” to the 1995
publication of “the only hymnal released by a Christian church that honors
in equal measure both male and female images of God.”

Interestingly, as
it travels down the years, UCC FIRSTS reveals the classic shape of a
Protestant denomination in America, performing the old paired functions: the
accommodating and the critical, the patriotic and the prophetic. The church
boasts that in 1777 its members saved the Liberty Bell from the British,
while in 1785 they ordained Lemuel Haynes, the nation’s first African
American pastor. In 1810 they formed the first foreign-mission society, and
in 1853 they ordained the nation’s first woman pastor.

The last item of
theological significance in UCC FIRSTS, however, is The Courage to
Be, the book that Paul Tillich (nominally a Lutheran) published in 1952
while he was attending one of the Reformed churches that would later join
the denomination. In the more than fifty years since,
the United Church of Christ can find no theological work to trumpet—and no
patriotic work, either. Everything since the 1950s of which the
church now wants to boast is adversarial: attempts to deploy Christianity
against the errors of the nation.

That’s a curious
admission for a major American denomination. By its own
account, the church’s intellectual life has come to an end. And as its
numbers catastrophically decline, the ordinary practice of its members has
ceased to influence the culture. The United Church of Christ is left
little except its putatively prophetic voice—and a strikingly unoriginal
voice, at that. All the issues on which the church opines, and all the
positions it takes, track the usual run of liberal American politics.

The key, however,
is not the mostly uninteresting politics of the church bureaucracy but
the astonishing lack of influence those political
statements have. With no deposits into the account of its prestige by
accommodating the other props of the nation—and no influence on the culture
from the everyday practices of its congregants—the
prophetic demands of the United Church of Christ cash out to nothing.
No one listens, no one minds, no one cares.

VI

The question, of
course, is why it happened—this sudden decline of the
Mainline, this collapse of the Great Church of America, this
dwindling of American Protestantism even as it has now finally found the
unity that it always lacked before. Each new book on the topic offers a new
explanation, but analysts tend to follow three general paths for explaining
the turn of liberal Protestant Christianity.

The
oldest is the Catholic complaint, born in the
Counter-Reformation. One could summon up here the arguments of the sixteenth
century: the worries of Erasmus about free will, or Cardinal Sadolet’s
debate with John Calvin about the dangers of “innovation” that come when
believers break the chain of apostolic succession that links them to
antiquity. But this Catholic line probably reaches its
peak with the great nineteenth-century theological convert from Anglicanism,
John Henry Newman—for he insisted on a logical connection between the
Protestant rejection of Rome and the decline of private devotion and social
unity in liberal Christian nations.

The second general path of criticism is an internal one—a
cry of Protestants against the spirit of their own age. In one form, it
found its greatest expression with Søren Kierkegaard’s
1854 Attack upon “Christendom.” In another form, it issued in Karl
Barth’s thunderous Nein! of the 1920s,
rejecting the emergence of what he called Kulturprotestantismus, the
effort to water Christianity down into a spiritual feeling for modern
culture to indulge. In America, however, the fundamental text of Protestant
complaint remains John Gresham Machen’s 1923 Christianity and Liberalism.
Against the Catholic claim that Protestantism was always bound to end in
something like the modern situation, Machen insists
that liberalism is not the necessary result of Protestant theology
and practice. It comes, rather, from the changes of the modern age and the
fearful notion of some Protestants that they must warp their religion to
match their times.

The third
common line appears most often in academic analysis—the account
offered by modern scholars, who typically pose themselves as standing above
the fray: religious historians rather than committed theologians. In this
line, competition is usually lifted up as the key factor: Religious
competition enabled the churches to flourish for a while in American
history, but once modern times brought non-religious choices into the
mix—newspapers, entertainment, sports, the goods of material prosperity—the
outmoded churches were doomed. Somewhere here belongs, as well, what
sociologists used to call the “Secularization Thesis,”
the now mostly debunked notion that modernity inevitably means the decline
of religion.

To these three
standard explanations, others could be added. There has emerged, for
instance, something we might call “Mere ­Religion.”
A curious pattern grew in the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversies of the
1920s—a cross-denominational sympathy: the fellow
feeling of people who, though their churches differ, nonetheless share a
view of the world and a sense that they are all under attack from similar
enemies. The pattern is worth marking, for it appeared not only in
the 1920s but over and over again in the ensuing decades.

Indeed, it
returned with a vengeance in our own post-Mainline age since the 1970s. You
can see it today among the liberal managers of the old churches, and you can
see it as well among conservative churchgoers, where the
horizontal unity of Mere Religion cuts across
denominations. Serious, believing Presbyterians, for example, now
typically feel that they have more in common with serious, believing
Catholics and evangelicals—with serious, believing Jews, for that
matter—than they do, vertically, with the ­unserious, unorthodox members of
their own ­denomination.

Related to this is
another explanatory factor: the general decline of
anti-Catholicism among American believers, particularly evangelicals.
Apart from a few fringe fundamentalist elements, anti-Catholicism in the
United States today belongs entirely to the political left, as its members
rage about insidious Roman influence on the nation: the five Catholic
justices on the Supreme Court plotting to undo the abortion license, and the
Catholic racists of the old rust-belt states turning their backs on Barack
Obama to vote for Hillary Clinton. Why is it no surprise that one of the
last places in American Christianity to find good, old-fashioned
anti-Catholicism is among the administrators of the dying Mainline—Bishop
Schori and all the rest? They must be anti-Catholics
precisely to the extent that they are also political leftists.

The
astonishingly rapid dechristianizing of Europe since
the 1960s has received, I think, too little attention as yet another
cause. The prestige of the theological work that came from European
thinkers—from the Reformation’s John Calvin all the way through to the
twentieth century’s Wolfhart Pannenberg—ensured that the American churches
maintained something of their old European distinctions. The Episcopal
Church was not free to become one with the Presbyterians so long as British
theologians spoke with the voice of worldwide Anglicanism. The Lutherans
were not able to merge with the Congregationalists so long as German
theologians kept the unique identity of Lutheranism alive.

Believers in this
country did not typically look to Europe for political or even ecclesial
authority. But, good Americans, they always felt
intellectually inferior to Europeans, and the
European churches helped the American denominations remain theologically
distinct even while those denominations were socially united in
creating the culture of the United States.
Protestantism is essentially gone from Europe now—its population
center shifted to the global South, and its intellectual center dissolved.
And once Europe ceased to produce defining theological work, the American
churches had less confidence in maintaining their old historical
­distinctions.

VII

In
1948, as he completed his draft of the U.N.’s Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the Canadian law professor John Humphrey
went home and noted in his diary that what had been achieved was “something
like the Christian morality without the tommyrot.”

That seems a
nearly perfect phrase: Christian morality without the tommyrot.
Humphrey meant, of course, all the unnecessary
accretions of prayer and miracles and faith and sacraments and chapels.
But the phrase might be the motto of all who answer surveys by saying they
are “spiritual, but not religious.” It might be
the motto of all who have a vague and unspoken—indeed, unspeakable—feeling
that it is somehow more Christian not to be a Christian.

It might even be
the motto of the Mainline churches today. Of
course, without all that stuff about God and church, the
morality proves to be empty: cups for us to fill
with almost any meaning we want—which, in the actual give and take of public
life, will almost always be political and economic meaning. In other words,
having gotten rid of all the tommyrot, the liberal Protestant churches can
at last agree in nearly every particular.

Unfortunately,
they obtained their ecumenical unity at the price of
abandoning most of the religious work that ecumenism was supposed to advance.
Indeed, the churches’ desperate hunger to mean more in politics and
economics had the perverse effect of making them less effective
opponents to the political and economic pressures on the nation. They
mattered more when they wanted to matter less.

Social nature abhors a social vacuum, and the
past thirty years have seen many attempts to fill the place where
Protestantism used to stand. ­Feminism in the 1980s,
homosexuality in the 1990s, environmentalism today, the quadrennial
presidential campaigns that promise to reunify the nation—the
struggle against abortion, for that matter: Leave aside the question of
whether these movements are right or wrong, helpful or unhelpful, and
consider them purely as social phenomena. In their appearance on the public
stage, these political movements have all posed
themselves as partial Protestantisms, bastard Christianities,
determined not merely to win elections but to be the platform by which all
other platforms are judged.

Look at the fury,
for instance, with which environmentalists now attack any disputing of
global warming. Such movements seek converts, not supporters, and they
respond to objections the way religions respond to heretics and heathens.
Each of them wants to be the great vocabulary by which the nation
understands itself. Each of them wants to be the new
American religion, standing as the third great prop of the nation:
the moral vocabulary by which we know ourselves.

Just as
religion is damaged when the churches see themselves as
political movements, so politics is damaged when political platforms
act as though they were religions. And perhaps more than merely damaged.
Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the killing fields of Cambodia, the cultural
revolution in China: We had terrible experiences in the twentieth century
when political and economic theories succeeded in
posing themselves as religions.

We’re not on the edge of something that frightening
today. But the death of Protestant America really has weakened both
Christianity and public life in the ­United States—for when the Mainline
died, it took with it to the grave the vocabulary in which both criticism
and support of the nation could be effective.

That vocabulary
was incomplete in many ways, and the churches often
failed to provide true Christian witness. But in its everyday
practice, Protestantism nonetheless gave America something vital: a social
unity and cultural definition that did not derive entirely from political
arrangements and economic relations. And America gave Protestantism
something in return: a chance to flourish without state interference, a
freedom to fulfill the human desire for what lies beyond the material world.

Among conservative
Christians, much attention is devoted to the question of
whether the hole in public life can be filled by either
Catholicism or the evangelical churches. I have my doubts. The
evangelicals may have too little church organization, and the Catholics may
have too much. Besides, both are minorities in the nation’s population, and
they arrive at our current moment with a history of being outsiders—the
objects of a long record of American suspicion, which hasn’t gone away
despite the decline of the churches that gave the suspicion its modern form.

Perhaps some
joining of Catholics and evangelicals, in morals and manners, could achieve
the social unity in theological difference that characterized the old
Mainline. But the vast intellectual resources of
Catholicism still sound a little odd in the American ear,just as the enormous reservoir of evangelical faith has
been unable, thus far, to provide a widely accepted moral rhetoric.

America was
Methodist, once upon a time—or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or
Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. Protestant, in other words.
What can we call it today? Those churches simply
don’t mean much any more. That’s a fact of some theological significance.
It’s a fact of genuine sorrow, for that matter, as the aging members of the
old denominations watch their congregations dwindle away: funeral after
funeral, with far too few weddings and baptisms in between. But future
historians, telling the story of our age, will begin with the public effect
in the United States.

As he prepared to
leave the presidency in 1796, George Washington
famously warned, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined
education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid
us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious
principle.” Generally speaking, however, Americans tended not to
worry much about the philosophical question of religion and nation. The
whole theologico-political problem, which obsessed European philosophers,
was gnawed at in the United States most by those who were least churched.

We all have to worry about it, now. Without the
political theory that depended on the existence of the Protestant Mainline,
what does it mean to support the nation? What does it mean to criticize it?
The American experiment has always needed what Alexis de ­Tocqueville called
the undivided current, and now that current has finally run dry.